Every so often
one comes across a recording which has long been available but has
somehow failed to attract much notice or be widely subscribed by
record stores, and yet on investigation proves to be a complete
revelation. What better for a reviewer than to revisit it with all the
benefits of hindsight. Such a CD, issued in 1994, is baritone Martin
Oxenham's Meridian programme of little known songs for baritone and
string quartet with or without piano (or in one case just piano) by
British composers, the title number, Sir Henry Walford Davies's
nineties setting of Browning's Prospice, particularly
rewarding.

Prospice is the
earliest of these gems, dating from 1894, when Walford Davies would
soon end his time as a student at the RCM. So music written with all
the vitality and freshness of early manhood, but in no sense
prentice-work; Walford Davies demonstrates an imaginative mastery of
his chosen medium in a work which has a unique personality of its own,
and at its date must surely have struck his contemporaries as
impressive, and innovative in the forces employed.

While the
Walford Davies is certainly the plum of this collection for me, the
others are pretty good too. Butterworth's Love Blows as theWind
Blows and Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs were both
completed around 1912. The latter, though familiar in its
choral-orchestral colours, is unknown in this version for similar
forces to On Wenlock Edge. Later came Somervell's A Broken
Arc and still later, after two world wars, Geoffrey Bush's cycle
of six songs Farewell, Earth's Bliss.

The impact and
concision of Prospice, and the eloquence of the quartet writing
reminded me of Samuel Barber's Dover Beach, written 35 years
on, with which it would make an ideal coupling on concert programmes.

Sir Henry
Walford Davies has been almost forgotten, Solemn Melody and RAF
March Past are still heard occasionally, but his big choral works,
extensive orchestral music and even his once ubiquitous church music
forgotten. His fame as a broadcaster, the first radio populariser of
music, died with him in 1941.

It all needs
revisiting, but even so, the power and eloquence of this early setting
- lasting just on ten minutes - is entirely unexpected; one is surely
not being too extravagant in describing it as an unknown
late-Victorian masterpiece. If one mutters 'Brahmsian' at the
melifluous opening string melody, that really only defines a starting
point, for Walford Davies soon builds a remarkably gripping little
drama, which baritone Martin Oxenham seems securely inside, the whole
given an enormous span by its composer's vivid handling of his forces.
The urgency of the first vocal entry proclaims a young man who had
recently experienced an all too real brush with his own mortality,
though in fact he would live for another 47 years. Thoroughly
recommended.

Browning also
provides the dramatic text for Arthur Somervell's totally unknown
narrative cycle of eight songs A Broken Arc, for voice and
piano, which must challenge his more familiar cycle Maud for
pride of place among his songs, though one would never guess it was
published as late as 1923 - it could well be a backward-looking work
from the 1890s, or at least Edwardian days. Here for his text
Somervell ranges across Browning's lyrics, both familiar and not so
well-known. This story of jealousy, the man who shoots his friend on
suspicion of his liaison with his lady love, is vividly handled. Least
good is the last song, a final setting of one of Browning's most
familiar lyrics 'The year's at the spring' which is far too careful to
express the youthful ecstasy of the words, and its place in the cycle
makes Somervell's intention difficult to read - it is surely
ironically.

From that richly
burgeoning pre-Great War period we also have two more familiar scores
- Butterworth's delightful Love Blowsas the Wind Blows
and Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs. In the chamber
version of Love Blows as the Wind Blows, Butterworth's cycle
has a fourth song, 'Fill a glass with golden wine' not present in the
orchestral version (recorded by Stephen Varcoe on Chandos CHAN 8743).
I must say I like the added colour that the full orchestra brings to
this work, yet, in the shadow of On Wenlock Edge, the string
quartet version with the addition of Butterworth's bittersweet setting
of 'Fill a glass', in this eloquent reading brings real rewards, while
the quartet's figuration evoking the river boat's engine in 'On the
Way to Kew' is charmingly done, the perfect foil underlining the
singer's lightness of touch in these atmospheric songs.

RVW's Five
Mystical Songs set for baritone and piano sextet - no chorus, no
orchestra - is good too. It was an inspiration to dig out RVW's own
chamber version of this evergreen work. Heard like this it is a lovely
score in its own right, but really puts the soloist into the spotlight
- here perhaps a little bland, or is that a concomitant of the chamber
music scale and the forces used? Whatever it is still a sweet
discovery.

In this company,
Geoffrey Bush's lyrical Farewell, Earth's Bliss, six setting of
early seventeenth century lyrics, completed in 1950, must have seemed
backward-looking in its pastoral aesthetic and approach, though with
memorable invention. And yet this is in its own way a gritty and
penetrating score. Bush's familiar happy knack of finding a memorable
phrase or rhythm in fast songs is every bit in evidence here in jaunty
settings of Dekker's 'O, the month of May' and Edwardes's 'When May is
in His Prime'. Yet slow music predominates and as the last song, a
setting of Herrick's 'Fair pledges of a fruitful tree' is elaborated
into an extended and intense climax we are reminded that it was first
heard only five years after the end of the War.

This is a most
enjoyable exploration of some worthwhile repertoire not easily found
elsewhere: I urge you to search it out while it is still available.